That's not a healthy society, Lloyd. That's a confederacy of suckers.
After people are dead?
Right. So let's allow drinking and driving. There are some people who can get away with it -- for a while. And killing someone with your car gives you a great incentive to learn about rhe responsibility that comes with freedom of choice, eh?
That's why we have regulations -- because there are a lot of assholes out there. If they get burned or blow their own nose off, that's a good lesson. If they kill or injure someone else, that's a really bad lesson.
It's a matter of safety and sense, Lloyd. Lots of people have no sense of the first and none of the latter.
That's what YOU "miss." You're throwing all of these "incentives" into the same pot, and don't distinguish between learning something the hard way at your own expense, and learning the hard way at someone else's expense.
Horseshit, with all due respect. I've seen the result that dull-witted scumbags can produce. I know a family that was destroyed by a drunk driver. It could have been some asshole in his garage with a pile of explosives.
You appear to live in a "perfect world" yourself, Lloyd, where innocent people don't die because of the dimwits. Based on what you're writing, it's an imaginary world of abstractions.
You can't make generalizations about these things. You have to think of the specific consequences of these "freedoms." Of course, most people will say "we aren't talking about drunk driving." But of course you are. Unless and until you distinguish between the nonsense idea that we'd all be better off if people "learned" to consider their actions from experience, and the saner idea that some experiences are things we can't let happen by default, there is nothing here except a lot of hot air.
Your freedom of choice ends at my nose.
If you're start "protecting yourself against the govenment" with some means of "protecting yourself against the government," please let me know first, so I can be out of range.
It sounds like solipsistic nonsense to me. There's a real world out there, beyond the perfect system of self-regulation that you seem to imagine.
The irony here is that I'm as opposed to foolish regulations as anyone you know. Then I read the posts here, and find that there is an equally foolish opposite: the fairy-tale notion that everything would be just fine if we got the govenment out of everything, and let us all learn about responsibility on our own.
Fine. But what do you do about the dead and injured?